3 Common Facebook Ad Mistakes That Even Some Pro’s Still Make

As someone who runs a “done for you” Facebook ad agency in Seattle, I see lots of Facebook ad mistakes and there are over 50 different ones that I’ll be pointing out on my blog in the coming weeks. In this post, I’ll cover three of the most common mistakes people make with their Facebook ads.

These three mistakes are all MAJOR ones that could literally mean the difference between making money with Facebook ads versus flushing your money down the toilet and claiming (incorrectly) that Facebook ads don’t work (they definitely do work)!

Ready to learn the 3 Facebook ad mistakes and how you can avoid them? Watch my video, or read the post below!

Facebook Ad Mistake #1 – Bad Audience Targeting

This is a mistake that MOST people make, even many of the advertising and marketing “pro’s” out there.

When doing Facebook ads, you should always segment and target your audience properly. In fact, you could do EVERYTHING else right, but if you get the audience and targeting wrong, you could fail and lose money.

Most people doing Facebook ads use audience targeting that is way too general and broad. When this happens, not only does it usually not work at all, and not only do you lose money, it also prevents you from seeing what actually DOES work (which you could then scale).

For example, let’s say you are an ecommerce store selling women’s clothing. Most people would target broad groups of women who may like certain stores, brands, and/or fashion designers. The problem is, not only will that targeting not work very well, even if PART of that broad audience did respond well to your Facebook ad, you wouldn’t know WHICH part to scale and you’d most likely lose money trying to figure it out.

Alternatively, if you had very specific, segmented targeting, and ads that were specific to each segment, you would know exactly what was profitable and what wasn’t, and you could take what’s working and scale it like crazy.

Sticking with our women’s e-commerce example, what if you ad/product/message struck a nerve with 35 year old women who like Oprah, do yoga, and drink tea? You would never know that if your targeting was too broad and you would fail, and flush lots of money down the toilet in the process, all while probably claiming that Facebook ads don’t work (but they do when you do it RIGHT!).

Summary: Be very specific and segmented when it comes to audience targeting with your Facebook ads. Create lots of different audience targets to test out what works and what doesn’t on a small scale, while spending a little amount of money, and then when you find out what works, scale it up like crazy and profit.

Facebook Ad Mistake #2 – Not Installing (or using) The Facebook Pixel

Using the Facebook pixel isn’t just smart marketing, it’s essential to your success. I’d still rate an email list as the #1 asset you should have (besides your knowledge, personality, and skill of course) but the Facebook pixel is a VERY CLOSE second, and in some cases, the pixel could be even MORE valuable and profitable than an email list!

I don’t have time in this blog post to go over all the reasons why you should be utilizing the Facebook pixel, I’ll do a video about that soon, but in the meantime, just take my word for it that you are crazy and insane if you don’t have the pixel installed and running on your website, and make the commitment to get it done right now, even if you aren’t planning on running Facebook ads in the near future.

Having the Facebook pixel installed on your site allows you to easily communicate with your audience where they hang out most, which is social media sites like Facebook. Not only that, it’s amazing the targeting and detail you can get with pixel data.

For example, you could tell Facebook to show an ad only to people that have spent 30 minute or more on a certain page of your website in the past 30 days. Amazing right?

Here’s another one: You could tell Facebook to show an ad only to people that have visited your sales page, but did not make a purchase. How powerful is that?

There are so many variations and ways to profit from this, and remarketing via the FB pixel should be a big part of your marketing and sales strategy, especially if you like winning and making money.

For those reading this that already have their pixel installed, make sure you are using it by communicating and following up with your audience based on the actions they are, and aren’t taking on your website. This is a game changer.

For those that need to install the pixel, I’ve got some great news. It’s gotten much easier to do, especially if you are running a WordPress website/blog. I have written a blog post and recorded a video showing you how to install and test the Facebook pixel on a WordPress site.

Facebook Ad Mistake #3 – Using Youtube Videos On Your Landing Page

This one is a biggie that MANY of the pro’s still get wrong. Do not, ever, under any circumstances use a Youtube video on any page or post that you pay to send traffic to! Please repeat that 10 times so it sticks!

Here is the deal, when people (that you pay for) click over to your site, whether you are sending them to an opt-in page, landing page, blog post, homepage, whatever, and they see your video, and it’s a Youtube video, guess what many of these people do; they click the little Youtube logo or title to watch your video on Youtube instead and then 15 seconds later, they see related videos on the side of flying cat memes that they click on and have completely forgotten about you and your message, and this is just someone you PAID to get to your website!

Don’t make this costly Facebook ad mistake. Instead, use something like Vimeo Pro, Wistia, or Amazon S3 to embed the video on your site.

Should you still do Youtube videos? Of course, heck yeah, I love Youtube, but keep the videos on Youtube and don’t put Youtube on your site. Same thing with Facebook video.

Whether you are making one or two of these Facebook advertising mistakes or all three, when you fix them, you’ll be ahead of most and you’ll be giving yourself a much better chance at making money with Facebook ads and being ultra profitable, unlike the others.